Sticky webs of wrong ideas.

"Did you care about how I felt before I could type?"

That's the question Oliver asked me last week during a period punctuated with some trying moments.  As always, we find time to sit down together at the iPad afterwards and Oliver apologizes and asks for forgiveness. His struggles with impulse control cause frustration for both of us. The trick is to get through it and to a place where we both feel OK on the other side. It isn't always easy. But I'm learning how to slow down and wait until I can get to the place where my responses only come from a place of love and empathy and deep gratitude for this little guy whose struggles are often misunderstood. I'm making progress.

Last week it occurred to me that it was I who should be asking Oliver for forgiveness. I have so many words at my disposal and they are easy to come by. I can explain why I misunderstood the boy for so long, why I didn't parent from a place of presuming competence even when I thought I was, why I said what I did and how I made choices along the way. But none of that probably matters so much to a little boy who couldn't make himself understood and who only needed my wide open love, acceptance and unshaken belief.

"Did you care about how I felt before I could type?"

The answer should have been unequivocally, "Yes!" But it's more complicated than that. So much of Oliver was unknowable before he could make himself understood through typing. Of course I cared how he felt! But somehow I had also allowed myself to be moved from a place where I thought I might understand the world from his perspective. I had "othered" my own child and I didn't even know it. Whoever started the story that Autistics lack empathy, the thing at the very core of our humanness, drove a wedge between us so slight that I couldn't even see it.  The wedge reverberated: "He can't understand so I can't understand."  Over the years I knew the empathy story was a false one; Oliver felt more, not less. But the wedge was already there. Wrong ideas about autism are pervasive and sticky like cobwebs across this path we're traveling. You carry them with you long after you've broken through to the other side.

I couldn't answer Oliver's question the way I should have and he didn't offer me forgiveness. But I stand now in a place of light where the webs of wrong ideas are plain. I can't change the past but I can promise to drive out the wedge between us that falsely led me to believe that he stood so far from my own understanding. And I can join my voice with his, though it often seems small and unheard, leaving it here along the path for others who might follow.